Migrating from Bazaar to Git

We used Bazaar since 2009 and were quite happy with it until bzr started to make serious problems in our daily business mostly because of some annoying long standing bugs and stability problems:

Bazaar Explorer randomly freezed many times a day

Bazaar PHPStorm Integration with lots of freezes and bad performance

No Support in Visual Studio, no Support in Monodevelop

Beside the massive performance problems it was also clear that Git has become the most commonly used
DVCS in the open source community. This was also heavily influenced by GitHub as it has taken the
world by storm.

After some internal discussion we decided to break up with Bazaar and completely switch to Git. This
would give use the following benefits:

Stable and full support in all major development environments and operating systems we use in
our business (PHPStorm, Visual Studio, Monodevelop on Ubuntu, Windows and Mac OS X)

No more freezes and performance issues

One version control system for both internal closed source projects and open source projects

Possibility to also host our internal projects on GitHub with a private plan

The basic migration to Git is possible with the Fastimport/FastExport file-format. So in order to
migrate a branch to git you just have to run a simple command:

bzr fast-export --git-branch=master | git fast-import

While this works very well it has one major drawback: lost bug tracker information.

Because there was no response and losing all these bug-ids was no option for us, I wrote a fast-export
stream-rewriter which is capable of rewriting the stream in a format that Git understands but with all
our bug id infos included.